


Sunrise in another body

by Taabe



Category: Escape to Witch Mountain (book)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:41:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Father O'Day runs into danger, Tía and Toní break the seclusion of their people to help him. Opening locked doors can be a difficult and painful talent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunrise in another body

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Azar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azar/gifts).



_El Salvador. 1983._

The door opened.

Clemente Velez felt the movement of damp air and turned his eyes. He could see nothing. The room had no windows. He was lying with his head bent against the wall. He had been too sore to sleep and too tired to move since they left him. His neck was a wrenching pain.

The room stank of mold and piss. Other men had protested this last condemnation in the corners. Or they had been too old to wait when the tin can was full, as he was. He also stank, and he was naked.

Fingers touched his mouth.

He had heard nothing, no scrape of the metal door, no pressure of a foot or a knee on the gritty concrete. He could see nothing of the figure crouched beside him. The hand against his lips was small and firm, a young hand that had worked outdoors but not constantly, a hand with light callouses and no scars.

He gathered himself to move. Against this young hand he had little hope; he might know more of fighting, even much more, but he no longer had the strength. Even with the door open and an assailant who did nothing but ask him for silence.

A foot brushed floor in the dark. His muscles jerked, trying to heave him upright, and he began to shiver at the pain, and the shivering jagged burning across his back.

The fellow of the hand at his mouth cupped the back of his head, touched his forehead and smoothed back his hair.

A second figure dropped to one knee against him. It felt for his hand and raised it until he could feel short hair, broad nose, burly shoulder. He knew this shape in the dark. They had sat late over the mission table on the lower East Side so many nights, arguing politics, briefing pro bono lawyers, making up camp beds for hungry children, talking down teenagers released from the ER with sewn-up gashes and the after-effects of near-fatal blood alcohol levels, cooking chili, reading poetry aloud.

Clemente let his head briefly fall against their linked hands. He kissed the hairy knuckles and began to sit up. _I will make no noise_ he repeated to himself, panting for breath. These two had passed the guards. He had heard no noise. The guards would still be there. How many guards did it take to subdue an old man in a commandeered building before dawn? He did not know how many other men and women they held here. He was sure he had not been alone.

Father Jason O'Day felt his limbs swiftly and lightly, eased him to sitting, then lifted him up. Clemente felt the doorway as they passed through and felt and smelt other open doors in the short hallway. Ambient light touched the end of the passage. Jason walked steadily toward the road, where the night guard would sit with bottle and battery lantern and gun.

Still in shadow, Clemente felt their companion's hand on Jason's shoulder, and they paused. He could hear no sound ahead. He could feel the sweat seeping into Jason's torn clerical collar. Slowly, but again steadily, they went on until they stood inside the door. He could smell the coming rain and an acrid edge of smoke. Humid air lapped his shoulder. He did not dare breathe as he longed to breathe.

A sound same to him then. Somewhere in the unlit square outside, someone was playing the harmonica.

The sound tugged at the edge of hearing. The player must hardly breathe into the instrument. Low and less rhythmic than delta blues, the music reminded him of a fragment of a work song, a slave song, he had heard in a cane field — _not a soul who knows my name. It's a wonder that I'm in this world at all._

It was a music of wet air and chickens on baked clay and wide open green leaves shedding water, of women walking in fear to fill water containers, of coffee and habañero seeds and cacao pods and bruised plantains and a gut-aching relief each time someone returned from a casual departure, of children kept from running.

The player was playing the square, in it's waiting, angry quiet.

They eased out of the doorway, and Clemente could see the embers of the guard's fire kicked nearly out — and the guard standing with his back to them, the muzzle of his rifle dug into the earth of the plaza mayor. Sweat ran down his arms and darkened his rolled sleeves, and he was vibrating like a runner in reaction after a long sprint with the shock of muscles pushed past endurance.

Jason set Clemente down against the wall, and their companion knelt, setting her body between Clemente and the rifle. He could see now in this darkness that was lighter than the darkness inside the building that she was a woman. She was slight, with a firm, fine cheek and chin and hair cut spiky short. He thought _Argentina?_ — but Jason was walking forward.

The guard shifted his weight. He seemed to hear nothing but the music pouring like night rain. Over the woman's shoulder, Clemente could see Jason taking one careful step. Then another.

He stood at the guard's shoulder, close enough that the man would not have to shoot him; he could club him faster and more accurately. Clemente found he had closed his had on the woman's shoulder hard enough to feel bone.

And the rifle loosened in the guard's numb hand, sliding with inexplicable silence to the ground, and fell at Jason's feet.

Clemente tensed for the shouting and the gunning engine of the guard's jeep, and gritted his teeth at the rip across the burns. The music planed like wind in the acacia leaves, and the guard seemed tangled in his own shirt, as though an acacia thorn charm doll had balled a fistful of it. He pivoted slowly. Jason had the rifle in his hands.

Still, the guard made no noise. He made no movement toward the jail, the gun, or the missing jeep. His face shone with sweat, but he was not watching the gun. He was not watching Jason's hands. He had not the surface tension of an adversary waiting his chance. He was looking past Jason to the darkened wall at Clemente's back or over them to the mountain ridges that ringed this place.

Outside the public square and the market square, streets of houses ran silently across the plateau behind them. No one walked here at night by choice. The university had shut down most of its classes before Clemente had arrived to lecture there.

The music keened like the footfalls of the young woman who had followed him down an empty university corridor where he had expected a mass of voices and the brush of bags and humming of distant phones.

The guard turned his hands palms up.

He said, almost inaudibly, "my family."

He did not say that leaving him here in an empty jail cell would mean mass murder.

Jason said, "come with us. All of you."

The guard nodded. They still stood two feet apart. Neither moved.

From the dark cement-block corner of the building on the right, between it and the makeshift prison, a shadow detached. It came along the wall and into the open with the woman's silent walk, and the music came with it.

Beside Clemente the music muffled as, with one movement, the piper flicked off the obscuring poncho and furled it on Clemente's lap. He was a man, lean and no taller than the woman.

He and the woman looked at each other, and she stood, touched Clemente once more on the lips, and slid into the prison house doorway. This touch had been softer, less a warning and more a caress. He had kissed her fingers.

Clemente pulled the poncho over his head, and then this man, too, lifted him up. Where his arms took Clemente's weight, the wool scored Clemente's skin.

"I have him," the player said into Jason's ear. "You need your hands. Tía will meet us." He said to Clemente, "my sister."

Clemente swallowed convulsively, not from the nausea of the pain but because this man's Spanish was the Spanish of Puerto Rico, and he had not heard it spoken like this, without any overlay of New York toughness, in more than forty years.

They walked after the guard, looking for home.

 

The guard's name was Amado Oscár Romero López. He told Clemente so while his mother and cousins packed rice and fava beans, and he and Jason bathed Clemente, first with water poured from the rain barrel and then, in desperate haste, with wine. He looked no older than eighteen. Clemente turned away from him. He would not risk Jason with protests.

In borrowed pants, his burns anointed with olive oil, Clemente found himself mounted on a mule, with a child of four in his arms and sacks scraping his thighs.

The woman, Tía, had returned with it. She had walked it onto the packed earth behind the house where the washing was done. Clemente, damp and stinging from his bath, leaned into trailing vines on another cement wall. He watched her walk into her brother's arms — heard him telling Jason, as Jason did up Clemente's pants buttons, that that the others in the prison had also gotten clear and the guards had not yet returned.

"I slipped the clutch on the jeep," Toní said. "Three of them went after it. I thought they had all gone, until Amado came out. The road carried it well down the hill. They will be awhile getting it out. If they all stay with it."

"Toní. Tía." Jason stood to put his arms around their shoulders, and for as long as it took to breathe the three of them stood there, their heads touching. Then Jason said, "we've got to get clear before they have time to start looking. If they send someone back for a tow rope, if they see anything, they'll come straight here."

Toní closed his eyes.

"They haven't yet," he said.

 

Now, holding onto the mule and the child, Clemente watched Tía walking on his right, stroking the creature's neck. It was not like Jason — even Jason holding the rifle on a transiently terrified guard — to let someone else return to that hell hole to open locked doors while three more guards with three more rifles were working a jack or a winch right down the road. It was like Jason — dizzyingly, infuriatingly like him — to turn up in a prison two thousand miles away from his home and his mission, and, God, it must be ten years since they had seen each other, in the last place where Clemente needed to hear about last rights or the ills of the eastern bloc.

Jason had left the mission suddenly, in the care of a substitute, for a temporary emergency that had apparently never let up. He had returned to Clemente's apartment for a night of shouting and frantic phone calls and left in the pre-dawn on a borrowed motorcycle. Two weeks later, he had sent back it's price in cash in an envelope with no return address. It was as though the familiar fury and tenderness that used to fuel their arguments had reached a pitch great enough to sear clear across the Atlantic and conjure him here. And now it was too late to argue.

They had thrown the rifle into the undergrowth when they left town.

"It's jammed," Toní had said with certainty. "Ranged weapons won't be a problem."

In darkness and thick vegetation, he could be right. It was still a stupid waste. Clemente had pocketed the ammunition. He had a machete ready to hand among the panniers. A machete could take off a man's hand at the wrist.

Around him, feet pressed leaves into the mud. Two teenage girls supported an older woman. One of the teenagers wore an infant bound against her chest in a makeshift sling. A woman of forty carried a sack of rice on her back and held two boys of seven or eight by the hands. Each of the boys carried a hastily secured bundle, and they stumbled against her as they walked, too heavy with interrupted sleep to avoid roots.

The child in his arms leaned her head against his neck and shoulder. Her hair felt soft under his chin. The woman with the sling rubbed the infant's back, and he remembered walking the mission floor with a newborn child while it's mother tried to sleep on Jason's bed and Jason phoned around to women's safe houses. The child was only weeks old, feeding every two hours and too young to respond to anything more than warmth and food. But when he shifted it from horizontal to vertical it could grip and burrow into his shirt. At the movement, he had felt such tenderness.

And that child had lungs. He had sat with the mother as she woke at one, at three, at five a.m., and the child screamed as it mouthed frantically for the nipple without turning in the right direction. _Dio,_ he thought, _let this one be older and able to sleep._

He listened to the muted scuffings and thought, _how can we hide so many tracks?_

They climbed, and he breathed in and ignored the burns by listening for the night birds and the whoop of howler monkeys. He smelt trees and mud and pollen. If it ends tonight, he thought, at least let me remember this.

Toní, at his ankle, moved up beside Amado and said at his shoulder, "they are coming. We've got to get off the road."

Amado turned his head to the rearing tangle trying to grow over the cracked tarmac.

"If we cut through, they'll see," he said.

"Better in cover than here," Toní said. "You go. We'll cover the tracks."

Clemente pulled at Jason's pack strap. He made sure the girl had firm hold of the donkey and dismounted, and he pulled the machete free.

Jason had turned to watch but did not stop him. He crossed himself and then picked up the child, carrying her in one arm. Clemente nodded; she would not be strong enough to keep the mule from bolting in the dark.

He followed Amado, keeping well clear of Amado's knife and widening the track. The rhythm returned to his arm and back. It was not subtle, and it was not silent. The whisk-whack of metal against branches and the lighter whizz through stems and creepers drummed around him. The blade set greenery rustling like a kinkajou on a branch, sliding through wet leaves and leaving long dark lines along its sides.

 

They stopped in a clear place at the foot of a tumble of rock. They barely had room to huddle all together, and the ground was wet. Adults held children on their laps to keep them warm. Clemente saw only then that the woman carrying the rice was now also carrying the four-year-old girl. Jason had gone. Or he had stayed, back there. With them. A man who played music at a jail break and a woman who had — opened a locked door.

Without a word, Clemente turned back down the trail, willing his weight not to shift too far, willing himself not to stumble. He dragged leaves and matted vines down behind him as he went. He kept to the path by feeling with his feet for the earth the whole family had churned.

The trip down, alone, seemed longer than the trip up, though he thought it shouldn't have. He slid and skidded in the mud with the naked blade in his hand, and once he lost his footing and jammed the machete into the ground to keep from cutting through his bare feet.

He thought rough questions at the night full of startled bird squawks. Had Jason known Clemente had been disappeared? Had he come looking? Had he been working down here at one of the missions or with one of the volunteer groups in the fields? When the archbishop Amado was named for had been shot at Mass and set off this whole bloody uprising, had Jason felt some kind of call to rethink his condemnation of all forms of socialist society, after all Clemente's failed arguments with him — or had he only gone looking for a place outside his own country? Had he come here by chance?

It amounted to the same thing in the end: He had carried Clemente out of prison, and Clemente cursed his own slowness and the loudness of his breathing.

He heard the harmonica again, and leaves stung his face. The path he had followed by feel disappeared into a mass of branches. He raised his arm wildly and stopped, shivering and forcing himself not to hack apart this unexpected defense. The harmonica chittered with the night birds.

A hand found his sleeve, then his hand, and Jason was there, drawing him sideways and sending showers of water from the young trees onto their backs. Clemente heard him draw a rueful breath and wanted to strike him. _You let me walk on in front because you thought the rear was more dangerous._

They found Toní leaning behind the massive bowl of a rotting tree, well down hill and only a few feet back from the road. The screen of shoots and stems hid them from it well enough that they could not see through it, but unless the monkeys set off screeching again, they would be able to hear anyone passing.

Clemente might almost have dozed then, while they waited and the harmonica went on, high and throaty as a tree frog.

Feet were running on the road. He heard a snap of broken glass and a curse over a dead flashlight. The harmonica screeched like a monkey in panic, and he heard a pinging of metal, a rattling like spent cartridges ejecting, but he had heard no shot. The cursing rose to frantic shouting. He made a move with his knife hand and felt Jason's touch on his wrist. The undergrowth unravelled in front of him with the impossible silence of Amado's falling gun, and they were easing out toward the road.

He saw a man racing after bullets that rolled freely down the pavement and another yanking at the safety catch on his automatic. The guard with the gun threw it aside, and as it hit the ground it seemed to come apart on contact. The third guard swung around at the noise, hissing at them to pull themselves together and lunging at the dropped gun. He was standing closest to the tree line, almost in the ditch, and he must have caught a vine, because he fell sprawling over it as, with a racing clatter, the mule appeared galloping down the curve of the road. It dodged a grab at its frayed rope and kicked out at the guard still scrabbling after ammunition.

Clemente, turning the machete against his thigh, heard it shrill a challenge as it went and thought _well done you bastard_ after it. It had bested them all. The ammo-gathering guard was down in the road clutching at his thigh. He would have a plate-sized red and yellow bruise.

The standing guards, with abrupt silencing motions, were aiming their useless weapons up the hill. Useless weapons could still intimidate, and their gestures said the escapees must not be far for the mule to have bolted at their shouting. In mute amazement, Clemente watched them sprinting higher up the road.

 

He was in Jason's arms again, and the howler monkeys he heard were real ones bowling across the canopy. He had rain on his neck.

Jason shifted his grip and said, "how much further?"

"How far have we come?" Clemente murmured.

"To the coast," Toní said," and Clemente realized they were not talking about the distance to Amado's family.

Jason said, "How did you come?"

And Toní said, "alone. Tía knew you were in danger. I saw this place. We've always checked in on you, since you left. We had to, for you and all of us."

"Practical," Jason said, in a tight, unreadable voice.

"You know why we came." Toní grasped Jason's upper arm. "We knew why you left. You had your own work, and you can't always hear even Tía, and you were afraid they might get to us through you. We knew. And anyway it was your choice. But you saved our lives, and you are our people, and we couldn't leave you to die alone here."

Leaves slithered in the long silence.

"They knew why we had to come," Toní said at last. "If we reach the coast, they'll know where we are, and we have a boat." He smiled, but his mouth twisted. "Just a fishing boat. But it's good at keeping off radar."

 

They said no more until they reached the edge of the clearing, where people curled together around rice sacks looked like an extension of the rock wall. Toní blew three soft notes on the harmonica. Amado's hand loosened a fraction on the machete. People stirred.

"They've gone past," Jason said. "They missed our trail. We might have a small fire; we're well screened here."

They lit oil-rich bark with a stub of candle and let it dry a handful of sticks. In the handful of light, Jason looked at Toní and Tía and said, "I think you should show them. Give them a choice."

Tía turned to Amado and one of his cousins, who still carried the baby. Amado still wore the charm doll with legs of acacia thorn, and his cousin had one pinned to the sling, well out of the baby's reach. Tía touched it questioningly. The baby stirred and mouthed a syllable, as though it was considering opening full throttle. Tía laid a hand on its head, and it quieted again.

She turned her hand up, and the woman, understanding, loosened the doll from the cloth and handed it to her. Amado jerked his loose and handed it over. Toni lifted his harmonica, and Tía nodded to him.

On her muddy jeans, the dolls began to dance.

The harmonica played the sad, flashing advance and retreat of a tango, lingering and turning, and the dolls lifted their thorn toes in intricate steps, twining their feet and lifting their seed arms over their seed heads with a minute rattle.

Tía watched them with the absorbed look of a musician improvising countermelodies. The music improvised with the dancers, now like salsa, now bossa nova, now cajun and creole and Incan water pipe and none of them, a music out of this warm wet chattering wood and its frogs and insects and carnivores and bromeliads.

It was not quite the folk music of Puerto Rico either, but he heard that music in it. He remembered the squares full of running, shouting, the communal anger, the speeches under flamboyán trees and stopping of cars, bullets tearing easily through flesh.

The way doors and mules and vines and the jeep responded obediently and the opposition fell apart with almost comical ease infuriated him. It should not be like this. Who were these two playing at revolutions?

_Why do this for me? Why one old man when so many others are dying? If you can do this, do it!_

Tía looked him in the face, and the grief in hers was clear even in the firelight. She shook her head.

Toní set down the harmonica.

He said, "There are not enough of us. Fewer than a hundred. Not enough to stop a real assault. But enough to be a threat. Can you imagine what the U.S. government could force fifty of us to do? Have you seen a witch hunt? Have you seen what it's like when the whole US military gets involved?"

"My life you have there." Clemente swung his machete at a handy wrist-thick vine. "I have been in exile 40 years."

"My people were there in 1932." Toní spoke tiredly, neutrally. "Some of them died with you. What I'm telling you is that we can only protect you so far, and we may be a risk. Tía and Jason and I have to protect our people too. That's why I understand Amado. It isn't only our lives. It's all our people. That's why we came alone, so we could let them kill us if it came to that." He handed Amado back his charm. "You can all stay with us, if you want to," he said. "Or we will help you cross the border."

Jason sat down beside Clemente, holding a blanket.

"You see now why I left New York?" It was an apology. "I couldn't let myself be taken. And I couldn't do anything for my people they couldn't do better themselves. One of my friends down here, Jorge Quíros, his brother flew the copter that got me out of Saigon, he has a kind of repair shop."

He swallowed. "Had. We were repairing bikes and teaching kids to fix engines, something they could do to pay their way while they were at school. We serviced the ambulance. Then I heard you were here. Then that you were not here." His voice roughened. "I tried to find out where you were. And I asked the wrong man too many questions. Jorge is probably dead."

Clemente took the blanket and wrapped it around them both.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a kind of crossover, and it is meant as a tribute. Clemete Soto Velez was a poet and a hero of the Puerto Rican uprising against U.S. sovereignty in 1932. He spent his later life in New York. The title comes from poem #21 in his collection, "The Blood that Keeps Singing," and I owe my knowledge of him to Martin Espada's "Hands without Irons Become Dragonflies" in "Imagine the Angels of Bread." So far as I know. Clemente had no direct contact with the El Salvadorean civil war, but I hope he will forgive me for weaving his story into this one as a way to understand some history new to me.


End file.
